I live in Loudoun County, Virginia—the data center capital of the world. Many of the online services and websites you use every day come to you from blocky, windowless buildings somewhere within a fifteen-mile radius of my house. The majority of them are here in Loudoun, but they are starting to pop-up in neighboring Fairfax, Prince William, and Fauquier counties too.
For security reasons, the service providers don’t offer concrete details about what systems live in which buildings. But we know the default region for new “cloud” services on Amazon AWS is US East (N. Virginia) (us-east-1), which is probably in Ashburn. Customers on Google Cloud who choose that service’s us-east4 region and Microsoft Azure customers who choose East US (eastus) or East US 2 (eastus2) are utilizing centers near here. Countless smaller “cloud” providers, hosting services, telecom companies, and more, have their own data centers in the area too.
The closest data center to my home is Google ARA1A, about 1.5 miles away in Arcola. It’s a huge facility with tight security and, apparently, its own on-site power plant. On cold days you can see big columns of steam coming up from its cooling towers. It’s not pretty, but it’s not really an eyesore either. It’s just a big building, which isn’t that different from all the other blocky buildings—offices, townhomes, and strip-malls—that spring-up as the suburbs continue to expand outward from our nation’s capital. And I really don’t see how ARA1A is any worse to look at than the abandoned fields, derelict farmhouses, rotting barns, and mounds of dirt that were there before.
That center was built in a mostly undeveloped area; its only next-door neighbors are a shopping center and a commercial/industrial park. There’s another data center not much further from my home—a relatively small facility owned by Amazon—that was nestled into an empty lot between a gas station, a shopping center, and a church. This one was located very close to two residential neighborhoods, and, as you might expect, there was absolute outrage when the project was announced. Because of the zoning rules in-place on that lot at the time, it was a “by right” development, meaning the owners could build the data center without any special approvals from the county. So they did.
It, too, turned out to be harmless. They have to comply with the county’s existing rules about nuisance noise, and they put some trees around the perimeter to make the buildings less obvious, and now you’d hardly even know it was there. The only people still complaining about it are those who want to live in a state of perpetual anger . . . and if the data center wasn’t there, they’d be yelling just as loudly about the empty lot instead.
The three fundamental human rights are life, liberty, and property (in that order of priority). Property rights—the right to do what you want with what you own—can only be limited to the least extent necessary to protect the life, liberty, and property of others. When humans band together into groups, they do not give up those rights. Groups (or “free associations”) of people—businesses, churches, associations, and clubs—can exercise many rights on behalf of the people who voluntarily create, organize, control, and fund them. In other words, if Amazon owns a piece of property, Amazon has a human right (because it is a group of humans) to do with it as it pleases, so long as it does not directly harm others.
All this to say: It’s none of your business if a company buys a plot of land and builds a data center on it. If the owner of the property doesn’t want it to become a data center, they can refuse to sell. But once Amazon, Google, Microsoft, or any other tech company owns the land, it’s theirs to do with as they please. They don’t need your permission. They shouldn’t need the county government’s permission either (and we should stop letting our localities dictate how land is used except within the narrow confines of protecting the rights of others).
There are a few “standard” concerns that people tend to express about data centers when a company wants to build one nearby . . . which are often similar to the NIMBY (not in my back yard) objections to new highways, power lines, office buildings, and more.
The first is the most understandable and justifiable concern: Worry that they’ll bring a lot of noise, pollution, or other negative effects to the community. The solution here is not to oppose the data center (or whatever else), but to push the local government to impose reasonable restrictions on the amount of noise, pollution, etc. that can be generated by the owner of any property, and to enforce those restrictions equally for all. Then it is up to the company to use the land in compliance with those laws. If they can’t do it, they can abandon the project. More likely, they’ll figure out how to mitigate or eliminate the harms.
The second is understandable, but not justifiable: Worry that the building will be ugly and “ruin the view” or “destroy the rural character” of the area. Of course I understand how annoying it would be if you buy a home with a beautiful view of forests and hills, and then somebody puts an ugly, windowless cube in it. But there is no human right (or civil right, or any other right) to a pretty view . . . or an unchanging view . . . or any other view. Old buildings collapse, new ones are built. Highways are widened or rerouted. Nature itself changes with time; trees are felled by brush fires, tornadoes, and beavers, rivers flood and recede, and erosion and landslides change the contours of the land. You can control and mitigate these things on your own property; you can’t control what happens anywhere else.
The third is concern about how a data center (or other project) might affect local property values. This argument is similar to the one homeowners’ associations (HOAs) use to justify their busybody declarations about what color your awnings can be and how short you have to cut your grass. It is true—to a point—that the “character” of an area affects what a parcel of land is worth, but this does not give you a right to dictate that character. If you can prove that a particular intentional act harmed you financially, you can take it to civil court and get financial relief. But you can’t order somebody not to build a data center (or not to paint their porch orange) because that might somehow theoretically reduce the value of your property. You can’t control the external variables that may affect your property’s value, only the internal ones (like what color you paint your porch).
The fourth is concern about electrical or water prices and infrastructure. Data centers, depending on their size and configuration, typically consume a lot of electricity and water. But these utilities are billed by usage . . . the amount a data center uses has no direct impact on how much you pay for your electricity and water, it only affects how much the data center pays. That said, there can be secondary costs—if the power and water providers have to build-up their infrastructures to support a data center, those costs may be ‘baked in’ to the base prices that everybody pays. Because these suppliers are “natural monopolies,” they should be subject to reasonable regulations that ensure infrastructure costs are mostly borne by those who needed it. However, some of those costs should be shared, because all users receive benefits from having more robust and redundant utility systems. And again, this is no reason to oppose the data center itself . . . it’s a reason to enact good local utility policy.
So . . . are you concerned about a data center moving into your neighborhood? Don’t be. They’re harmless. They may even be beneficial. The amount of tax revenue Loudoun County gets from all these data centers lets them keep residential property taxes lower than they would otherwise be, and, thanks to our overbuilt electrical grid, in sixteen years I think we’ve only had three power outages longer than an hour (and one of those was the infamous 2012 derecho, which took out the data centers too).
I should also point out that you’re reading this article on a website . . . which is served to you from a data center. . . . If you want to stop the proliferation of data centers, you should take the first step yourself: Sign off, and encourage your friends to do the same. You don’t get to complain about a problem when you are part of its cause.
In any case, please at least accept that it’s none of your business what other people do on their property. You have as much right to tell Amazon not to build a data center on their property as Amazon has to tell you to repaint your shutters in Amazon’s trademark orange color—that is, none at all.
Here is a handy flowchart that might help:
